At the cafe we are fortunate enough to be able to read Dean Baker regularly.  But if you are looking for a nice summary, for others as well as yourself, of his explanations of the stock market and housing bubble bursts, and how we could avoid them in the future, his new paperback book Plunder and Blunder, is very short, clear and accessible. 

It's so good to have him at the cafe.  He deserves a much wider public audience than he has.  Hopefully, things are moving in that direction.  He can write--and he's been right repeatedly, early, on big things.  Surely there ought to be a more prominent place for him in the public sphere than for others of whom one or both of those things cannot be said.   

Other stuff I've been reading lately:

Jonathan Alter's The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope was a lively, journalistic-style read not deep on analysis of the New Deal but insightful about FDR's character and approach.  

Alan Lawson's A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis was somewhat less lively but more informative as a programmatic overview of the New Deal.   

I note that one of the Very Short Introduction books, The Great Depression and the New Deal, by Eric Rauchway, is in the queue for a cafe discussion soon.  I've not read that one yet.